In with the Devil

by James Keene

  No matter how shabby the old place was, their new home—at the end of a bleak side street—was a stark comedown for the Halls. Gary further disrupted the tight-knit clan when he refused to make the move and chose to shack up with his girlfriend instead. She was Gary’s height, with shoulder-length, brown hair and a pear-shaped figure that only got plumper after she became pregnant with a daughter in 1985, the only child they had together. They eventually married in 1987. Although she was five years younger, she tended to call the shots for the couple—much as Berniece did with Robert.

  Despite the upheavals in the twins’ relationship, they did manage one last bonding adventure before married life took a firm hold on Gary: a car trip out to the West Coast along with another male friend. To save money, they pitched tents on campgrounds instead of stopping at motels. The three also once picked up a woman. Years later, Gary confessed to a police detective that they took advantage of her in some fashion. It may have been his way of initiating Larry into sex. Whatever they did, Gary would feel increasingly guilty about the incident as he got older, especially about the impact it may have had on his twin.

  Back home, the Hall brothers left rebelliousness behind with their teens and attempted to become industrious, law-abiding citizens. Gary bounced among several different jobs, including factory work and a stint as a bag boy. He was also employed by a janitorial service, which then hired the other twin. Although Gary soon left that job, Larry found a lasting career there and saw the company’s owner, Robert Heath, as both a mentor and friend.

  Larry worked the night shift, sweeping and cleaning businesses that ranged from banks and variety stores to factories. If necessary, he dragged the plastic bags of trash back to his two-tone ’84 Dodge van for later disposal. When Heath suddenly died, his major account, the Farm Bureau Credit Union, rushed to make Hall an employee. He was so trusted that he had no supervisor and no requirement to punch in or out. If he had to report to anyone, it was directly to the general manager.

  Despite the confidence he inspired in his employer, his few friends thought he could not have led a bleaker existence. His days were spent in suffocating, squalid close quarters with aged, cranky parents, and his nights were devoted to menial labor in the eerie solitude of empty offices. Although his pay significantly improved with the credit union, his work became even more tedious and confined to three squat brick branch buildings where he was unlikely to see a soul. He may have been shy, but he also hated to be by himself.

  No wonder then, friends thought, that he poured himself so completely into his hobbies. He pursued his passion for vintage “Mopar” Chryslers and drove the countryside looking for deals. “Larry could find old cars and old car parts like nobody I ever knew,” says Ross Davis. “I used to have a body shop in Wabash, and when I would think that all my sources were dried up, Larry would come and tell me, ‘I was going down this old country road, and the car you’re looking for is sitting back there behind a barn.’ He just burnt the roads up looking for that stuff.”

  By the late eighties, another diversion became even more important to Larry—Civil War reenactment. A 1986 TV program first drew him to it, then, in 1988, he got up the nerve to join a local group that portrayed the Nineteenth Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the Union Army’s “Iron Brigade.” Known for their distinctive high “Hardee” hats with the folded brims and bugle emblems, the Nineteenth were a valiant if luckless crew who probably lost more men per capita than any other blue company in the war.

  Most of the Iron Brigade reenactments were “fought” in county parks around the Midwest. They would set up camp on Friday, often sleeping in tents on the grounds, then spend the rest of the weekend in uniform, conducting drills and mock battles for the local residents and schoolchildren who stopped by to observe. For Larry, the events were a welcome break from his solitary lifestyle, offering both camaraderie and a ready-made antidote for his limited social skills. Since reenactors were supposed to behave like Civil War soldiers, they could create elaborate alter egos with jobs and families appropriate to an infantryman from Indiana in the 1860s. To hold up his end of the conversation, Larry bought used books on regional Civil War history and studied harder than he ever did in school.

  Reenactment would be the one shared interest of the Hall twins in which Larry boldly led the way. Initially, Gary balked at the expense of the vintage regalia, but once he saw Larry’s rifle and uniform, he was hooked. True to form, Gary made himself so popular among his fellow soldiers from the Nineteenth that he was voted a promotion to be their corporal. By all rights, the much more knowledgeable Larry should have won this distinction, but he never let on that it bothered him.

  The Nineteenth Indiana looked so authentic that they were invited to become extras for two Civil War movies: Glory, filmed outside Atlanta in 1989, and Gettysburg, which was shot near the historic battlefield in 1992. (In the latter, Gary is briefly visible scrambling down a hill, the only glimpse of either twin in either picture.) Glory, though not nearly as lavish a production, became the more rewarding experience for Larry. Fellow infantryman Micheal Thompson hitched along with the Halls for the ride to Georgia. He had grown up in Wabash, but didn’t meet the twins until they all joined the Nineteenth Indiana. He remembers “laid-back Larry” driving as frenetic Gary gabbed on and on in the passenger seat. If the brothers bickered, it was over directions, with Larry usually winning out. Still, Thompson says, “I thought Larry liked the trip we took to get there as much as he liked being there.”

  The moviemaking turned out to be more exciting than Larry expected. “It was actually my first reenactment combat,” he later told a reporter for the Marion, Indiana, Chronicle-Tribune. “I learned a lot, but it was also dangerous.” Usually, reenactment bayonets were dull, brittle pieces of metal intended for show. But those wielded by soldiers in the film were sharpened steel, and one nearly stabbed Larry as he backed up into it. He found the pyrotechnics for cannon blasts even more frightening. “They had a stuntman in front of me during one scene. He was blown six feet into the air by an explosion. It was planned, but even that seemed dangerous.”

  No one was more quoted for the article than Larry, his enthusiasm for reenactment evidently bubbling through his typical reserve. “It’s really just a neat hobby,” he said, adding, “I’ve learned a lot historically about the war, too.” But when asked the major reason why he enjoyed reenactments, he replied, “It’s like traveling to the past. That’s why I do it: to travel back in time.”

  This wistful sentiment was further illuminated by the photograph of Larry, Gary, Thompson, and a friend that ran alongside the article. All stand at ease with their hands clasped around the barrels of their rifles. While his comrades, in character, look at the camera with grim determination, Larry is turned slightly at an angle and gazes off in the distance with a contented, tight-lipped smile.

  The filming for Gettysburg, a little more than two years later in July of 1992, would bring higher per diem pay and generous buffet meals for all three days that the extras were on set. But the trip would also expose the increasing divergence in the twins’ personal lives and their commitment to the Nineteenth Indiana.

  Micheal Thompson was unable to get as much time off as the Halls, so he took a bus out to Pennsylvania to meet them. A tense family scene awaited him. Gary had broken the all-male sanctity of their Civil War pilgrimage by bringing a woman along. Although he had divorced his first wife a little more than a year after he had married her, he had got hitched again, this time to a slim, athletic redhead named Deaitra. A few nights before Thompson arrived, the Halls had decided to splurge on a motel. Larry was both shocked and offended when he learned that he couldn’t share a room with his brother and Deaitra. He stormed off in Gary’s car, which they used for the trip, and didn’t return until the next morning.

  Although Thompson didn’t know about the incident when he arrived, he couldn’t help but detect some frostiness from Deaitra. “She was another control person like his first wife,” Tho
mpson says, “but a bit more on the wild side, and she made it clear she wasn’t all that interested in reenactment.”

  It would be the twins’ last extended road trip together, for a reenactment or anything else. Instead, they went to Midwest events that were just a few hours from Wabash. Looking at photographs from this period, it’s clear that Gary’s family obligations were starting to intrude. In one sepia-tone period portrait, seven members of the Nineteenth Indiana pose at a campsite, with Gary’s blond infant daughter, in a white pinafore, perched incongruously on his knee. Her uncle Larry kneels next to them in a rifle-ready position, seemingly oblivious to her presence.

  If Gary was getting tugged back to reality by his personal affairs, other photos show Larry immersing himself that much more deeply into his fantasy life. By October of 1990, he appears with full muttonchop sideburns, his bid—as he later explained to a reporter—to get promoted from foot soldier to commanding officer in local reenactments. He wanted to portray General Ambrose Burnside, an Indiana native, whose distinctive facial hair made him the namesake for both the hybrid half-beard mustache as well as the more ordinary “sideburns” (his name inverted). Hall would not get the part because, as he later discovered, the general was six feet tall. His height was unusual for the era and as much a distinct part of his identity as his facial hair. Larry still kept the “burnsides,” believing they helped him look more authentic—even if he had to remain in the infantry.

  Of course, Hall’s desire to blend in with the nineteenth century made him stick out that much more in real life. It was surprisingly flamboyant behavior for a man who had been so painfully shy. His neighbors, says his high school friend Ron Osborne, thought the whiskers were “a little weird.” But Larry did not mind the stares or snickers. He had finally found a community he could embrace—and more important, one that would embrace him back. He continued to attend reenactments into the early nineties, often on his own. He even went to Revolutionary War events such as the one in Georgetown the weekend before Jessica Roach’s disappearance, but still wore his Civil War uniform. Gary Miller, the Vermilion County chief investigator, soon discovered that other attendees were quick to place Larry on the scene. As one would later testify, “He had an exquisite set of burnsides.”

  After listening to Hall blurt out his dreams and “out-of-body” experiences in the Wabash city council chambers, Miller says, “I felt he was capable of killing Jessica Roach, and I felt he was certainly a suspect in the true sense of the term suspect. But I still didn’t think he was absolutely the guy.” In all of his years as an investigator, Gary Miller had learned to never get too excited by one interview.

  Tempering his enthusiasm was the reaction of the other detectives in the City Hall conference room. Although they were clearly disturbed by Hall’s “dreams,” they dismissed him as a “wannabe”—a police term for geeks who become obsessed with a crime and imagine themselves a part of it, often because of a fixation on the victim.

  Hall, they insisted, was harmless, but they divulged further information that only reinforced Miller’s suspicions. In just the past month, he had been arrested for stalking a jogger. There had been previous complaints about stalking as well, but Detective Amones had referred Larry to a local counseling service in response to those. Then there was the Tricia Reitler abduction. Even though the Marion police were adamant that someone else was responsible, in his gut Miller knew that there were too many similarities with the Jessica Roach case for this to be a coincidence.

  As Miller drove back home from his first interview with Hall, he mulled over all that had transpired during his few hours in Wabash. If anything, the trip reinforced his concerns about the Indiana police, and he faced the real possibility that they might take the case away from him. Although Roach was probably abducted from her home in Illinois, that was not certain. But her body was unquestionably found on the other side of the state line. If he so desired, the local Indiana state’s attorney could claim jurisdiction, despite the fact that an Illinois detective had tracked down the defendant.

  Miller would then make the single most fateful decision of the entire investigation—he would bring in the Feds. Immediately upon his return, after receiving permission from the sheriff, he called Frances Hulin, the U.S. attorney for the Central District of Illinois. Larry Hall, he told her, had crossed state lines to abduct and kill Jessica, making it a federal case.

  Usually, the police don’t take homicides to U.S. attorneys. Murder—unless it’s committed during an act of terrorism—is not a federal crime. Hall could still be convicted of kidnapping, which brings a life sentence, but the assistant U.S. attorneys who would try the case would not necessarily have as much experience with a murder trial as an assistant state’s attorney would. Worse yet, after an indictment, the investigation would be turned over to the FBI, the Bigfoot nemesis of all local detectives.

  Still, for Miller, none of the potential problems with the Feds outweighed the danger of letting the Roach case go “to the other side.” Besides, he had a close working relationship with Ken Temples, the FBI agent for his region. Going to the Feds looked even better when Hulin assigned Larry Beaumont as the lead prosecutor. Before he had joined the U.S. attorney’s office, Beaumont had been an assistant state’s attorney, which gave him plenty of experience with capital cases.

  The next step for Miller was to return to Wabash as soon as possible to give Larry Hall a polygraph (or, as it’s commonly known, a lie detector test). Miller explains, “For me, a polygraph is simply an investigative tool. It’s not something that will tell you absolutely that a guy is guilty or innocent. But if someone is willing to take it and a good polygraph examiner tells you he passes, then you can pretty much eliminate him from the investigation.”

  Miller had a favorite polygraph examiner who worked for the state of Illinois, but even at this early stage in the investigation, Miller would be overruled by the Feds. They insisted that he use an FBI agent for the examination, and one would not be available for two weeks. Miller had to impatiently cool his heels, wondering if Hall would ever return to the Wabash police station of his own volition.

  On Tuesday, November 15, 1994, Wabash detective Jeff Whitmer fetched Hall from the tiny front room of his parents’ house. He told him that Miller was back, this time with an FBI agent, but once again Larry did not seem unduly alarmed and agreed to drive himself downtown. He never contacted a lawyer or even informed his family of where he was going. Whitmer took him to the old station house and a tiny interrogation room barely big enough for the two desks inside it. On one end was a tiny window, propped open above a hissing steam radiator; on the other, a darkened two-way mirror. Miller sat waiting with Mike Randolph, a short, balding man in suit and tie. He had a mild, Bob Newhart–like manner that for Hall must have been a welcome contrast to the burly brusqueness of the Vermilion County investigator. When they all chatted a bit, Hall made some eye contact with Randolph in a way that he never did with Miller.

  Randolph matter-of-factly explained that he would be hooking Hall up to the polygraph to ask some questions about Jessica Roach. He presented Hall a series of forms to complete. The first was his waiver of rights, which Randolph had him read out loud before he signed it. Next came the consent form for taking the polygraph, but after reading it over a few times, Hall put the pen down.

  “I can’t do this,” he told Randolph, “because I don’t believe I will pass it.”

  Miller practically jumped out of his seat. It was pretty much what he had expected, but a big break nevertheless. By refusing the polygraph, Hall had now incriminated himself more than if he had failed. They couldn’t use it in court, but in essence he was telling the investigators that he knew something he didn’t want to tell the truth about.

  But Randolph was going for more than a refusal. He gently probed to see why Larry thought he wouldn’t pass. Suspecting that the FBI agent might get more from Larry on his own, Miller stood up and left the room, but he continued to watch them through the two-wa
y mirror from next door.

  Once again, Hall went on about his dreams to Randolph. This time he called them nightmares and confided to the FBI agent that they were interfering with his sleep and making him depressed.

  Both men spoke softly, and Miller could barely hear what they were saying through the glass. All around them, the station house was in chaos as the department prepared to move that day to new quarters. Miller would pop back into the observation room a few times, but then he got some coffee and tracked down Whitmer to see what more he could learn about Hall. As they talked, an excited Randolph rushed over to interrupt them.

  “He’s going to make a statement,” Randolph told Miller. “I need you to witness it.”

  FBI agent Randolph would later testify extensively about how he had gotten Larry to open up during that hour after Miller had left them. First, Randolph told Hall that he needed treatment to stop his nightmares and depression. Larry replied that he had been referred to a mental health center by Detective Amones, but that the young counselor who had been assigned to him could not deal with his issues. At times, Larry told Randolph, he was lonely and felt an “urge” to be with women. Randolph asked if that urge was irresistible, and Larry had said yes, the urge was something he had to satisfy to “feel better.”

  Randolph then pulled out a photo of Jessica Roach, as he had been prompted to do by Miller. Again, Hall looked away, but this time a tear rolled down his cheek. For the next few moments, they sat in silence. Then Randolph asked, “Why don’t we start talking about that weekend?”

  In his flat, quiet voice, with his head down, Hall started to talk. He spoke in detail about Jessica Roach: where he had abducted her, what he had done with her in his van, and how he had killed her. “I just do things,” he said. “I am not in control. This was one of those times when I was not in control.” He had almost as much to say about Tricia Reitler and then made vague comments about killing other “girls”—at least two in Indiana and one in Wisconsin near a reenactment. “All of the girls looked alike. I cannot remember all of them,” he told Randolph. Later, in a similar vein, he added, “I picked up several girls in other areas, but I can’t remember which ones I hurt.” There were no more tears, but as Larry spoke, Randolph noted, his face twitched and he compulsively wrung his hands.